The present invention relates generally to structured light profiling of a part and more specifically to methods and systems for image processing to obtain a three dimensional profile of a part using a structured light source.
In structured light applications, a three dimensional profile of a part is obtained by using a laser source and at least one video camera. A laser source emanates a laser beam and spreads into multiple (one or more) laser stripes which strikes a surface of a part. These stripes are viewed from one or more video cameras from an angle other than the illumination angle. Typically, applications for structured light profiling include obtaining shape profile information about the part or generating a 3D contour map of the part.
The limitations of using laser stripes to obtain accurate profile information are mainly attributed to sampling error and the noise associated with the laser because the center of a laser stripe may not be imaged at the center of the pixel of the camera and may not be the detected intensity peak. Sampling error occurs while locating the center of the laser stripe on the image. There are image processing techniques such as maximum intensity, intensity center, Gaussian fitting and zero-crossing which attempt to extract the relevant information from the laser stripe. The associated problem with several of these techniques is that it gives the location of the highest peak, which is not the true center of the stripe. Current correction techniques for this error include neighborhood averaging over neighboring pixels and doing a weighted average or using fitting methods, but these techniques also fail to adequately address the sampling error.
The noise associated with the laser primarily takes the form of laser speckle, which is the oscillation of the intensity profile for a laser when it is reflected from the surface of the part and is caused by coherency of the laser. One way to reduce the speckle noise is by choosing an appropriate viewing system. By changing the size of the aperture, the size of the speckle changes, the larger the aperture, the smaller the size of the speckle. However, in this case there's a depth of field tradeoff.
Therefore there is need for an improved image processing technique for reducing the speckle noise and also the sampling error in structured light applications.